Ken would need 30 radiation treatments – one a day, five days a week, for six weeks. The boys only had four weeks of school left, so I wondered what I would do with them for those final two weeks of Ken’s treatment. Yes, they were 12 and 8, and under normal circumstances, they would have been fine at the house by themselves. But nothing about what we were going through was “normal”. Jesse worried himself into either a headache or an upset stomach about every third day. Benjamin didn’t want to be away from me physically for long. Even at home, if I left the room where Benjamin was, he would come looking for me – just to make sure I was still there. That continued throughout Ken’s illness and worsened for quite a while after Ken died. I didn’t dare leave him for long with anyone except Mama and Daddy or Jan and Brian, or he would go into panic mode. Poor baby.
I had heard something at church about a summer day camp at Camp Scott Patterson, right down the road from our church. Keith was on the Board of Directors for the Catoosa County Baptist Association, so I figured he could give me some info on the day camp. I called and explained that I only needed a place for the boys to go for the first two weeks of summer. Keith said he would talk to the camp director and find out if they could come just for the two weeks (usually you had to sign up for the entire summer), and he would find out how much it would cost. When he called me back that evening, Keith said, “Your boys are signed up for the first two weeks, and it’s already been paid for. All you need to do is go by and fill out the papers.” There he went, again, being such a blessing. All I had asked for was information. What I got was a solution to my problem and an answer to a prayer I hadn’t prayed yet. He never told me who the “angel” was that paid for the boys to go to “Camp Scott P” that summer. God Bless them, whoever it was.
So, we set about preparing for a new leg to this journey of exhaustion. We scheduled the treatments for the mornings so we could get back home before the boys got home from school. The treatments themselves would only last about 20 minutes each, so at least we didn’t have to be at the hospital all day like we were with the chemo treatments. Ken had done so well with all of his other treatments and procedures, I assumed radiation would be no different. But... you know what they say about assuming. Boy, was I WRONG!
No comments:
Post a Comment